Remove image size limit when placed on Camtasia canvas

Here's the scenario: I have a background image that I've created in Illustrator at 15660px wide (yes, really) and 1080px high. Why so wide? Because the background is going to slowly scroll for the duration of the video. So I export to png, import the png to Camtasia, place it on the canvas...and Camtasia shrinks the image to fit the canvas width. When I scale the image back to 100%, it's horribly blurry. Turns out this is because of a limit on how big of an image you can place.

There is a workaround for this, which can be found if you look in the "problem" threads (basically, you cut the image up into smaller chunks and then stitch it back together in Camtasia).

I'm suggesting that it should be possible to place an image at its original size without Camtasia automatically resizing it. This would make it much easier to create and use long scrolling backgrounds.

I've made many dynamic panorama productions where the panorama image [7000x1000] was slowly [in 1 minute] scrolled across a 1920x1080 canvas [animation]

the resulting files [at 12920x1080 MP4] were huge, and basically would not play well in any browser [even locally]; these projects had high bit rates [12000+] due to quality setting; I have not [yet] tested lower bit rate productions [like 3000]

Were those where the image was stitched together in Camtasia from separate files or where you had managed to place one really wide image? If the latter, that would explain why there's a limit... If it's the former, that does not bode well for the video I'm working on!

I don't know which version you are using, but I just achieved this in v8.6 with no workaround. I started with a video and set the editing dimensions to match it (1920 x 1080). Then I placed an image file (4300 x 1080) on a layer below it. The image file was indeed made smaller and would not resize via Visual Properties, but when I used the image handles (or click+mouse wheel) I could make the image large enough. I then set it up to animate horizontally across the screen, timed to the video length. If this is unclear, let me know and I can repeat the process for a screen capture and upload it.To Kayakman's point: 14 seconds occupies nearly 50MB (using a 75% quality output).

I'm in v9. Resizing is not the issue; it's that the image is badly degraded. I think that your test image was still within the size limits that Camtasia can handle without seriously degrading the image.

That's exactly what I did in v8.6, although I used an image under 25000px wide (and the controls are different). Of course, either of us would still end up with a gigantic video file if producing a clip of any serious length (and at decent quality).

Yes, that's exactly what I originally did as well. And when scaling the image back up to 100%, it's very badly degraded. I'm not the only person to experience this; there's a separate thread about this as an issue.

It's also a completely unrealistic example, Sorry kayakman, why would anyone take 100 words of text and span it across a 25,000 x 1080 in the first place? Those stroke outlines on the text looked more like blobs than high quality text to me.Your text is so massive, it masks some of the pixelation. But it's there, I promise you that it.Try that with some smaller text.

Here,
here's a 30,000 pixel image with smaller text averaging around 50
pixels high. Open this in Camtasia and tell me how great it looks.

Just right click that sliver down there and download it.

Or don't bother, look at this, here's what you'll get.

Camtasia can work images this large.But you have to stitch image together if you want clarity.

I cropped my huge panorama "Cropped" not resized. To 15, 660 x 1080. It look terrible in Camtasia.So I took smaller chunks. 10,000 x 1080. Still not very good.9,000 x 1080.Soft image, usable but noticeably degraded.8,000 x 1080.Looks pretty good. 7,000 x 1080. looking pretty good, fine details starting to come through much better.6,000 x 1080. Still could use some improvement. But not much.

6,000 pixels is miles short of 15,660. Heres 15, 660 X 1080And here's 6,000 x 1080. if you look closely at the tree branches.Other fine details.You will see the original image is still a bit sharper. But only the finest of details.

I don't see how you can have sharper images and better luck than everyone else does that tries.But if you insist I'm wrong or can't see what's right in front of me, so be it.

Here's my example. Here I have a 21,316 x 3696 pixel panorama I created in Photoshop.

I created a New project in Camtasia. I went with 4K project setting to give Camtasia some breathing room. An image this large is almost 10MB as a Jpeg. To large to share on this webpage.

However, having two monitors. I can still show demonstrate what's what.

I'll start with the panorama at 9% scale in Camtasia.The house in the red rectangle will be used as a point of focus.

In this next image, I have the image scaled to 100% in Camtasia's . The house is very blurry and doesn't look very good.Details are hard to come by.

On the right is a 1920 x 1080 monitor. That same image is open in windows photo viewer. I positioned it as close as I could to match Camtasia's.You can see fine detail in the original image.It blows away what you see in Camtasia.Once again,Camtasia fails to import this large image and make it a high quality image.

As I said earlier, Premier Pro is the only software I've tested, that's even up to this task.

It's unfortunate that Camtasia isn't up to the task. But it's predictable. It can't edit 8K video either.

I reached out to tech support to see if there was any way to bypass the imposed automatic image re-scaling [registry edit, etc.]; not possible; this resizing seems triggered by either width or height; under those dimensions = no resizing; 4096x4096 is the limit

my experiences have shown that a 25% +/- scaling change is the practical limit before too much distortion is encountered

almost all of my very wide image work in Camtasia has involved photo panoramas made from 35mm digital JPG photo images with a native resolution of 3168x4752; the panoramas have been auto-stitched by using either Adobe's Lightroom, or Hugin; Hugin offers flexibility in setting output dimensions; Lightroom just does its own thing

today, I fooled around with a Lightroom panorama that was made from 26 images; at 40089x4096, it was too large for re-scaling within my 25% limit to work well with 1920x1080 project settings

so I opened it in Snagit, and resized the canvas to 40089x1080 [centered], essentially only focusing on the middle strip of the panorama; I then sliced that image up into 10 pieces; 9 at 4000x1080 and 1 at 4089x1080; this gave me the ability to reconstruct the entire image in the canvas by hand stitching them end-to-end; it also gave me a scrolling panorama project that preserved 100% original image quality

hand stitching the 10 separate images in the canvas was very easy, and accomplished in just a few minutes; I've previously constructed images this way that were wider than 80000; the canvas seems to handle them easily

the only tedious part was precisely chopping up the original wide image in Snagit; it has no automatic function to do so; so lots of resizing canvas work; that took the most time

because the issue is basically the need to preserve original image quality, it seems that the ability to import such oversize images, at native resolution, then crop them to match the desired project settings, would solve this problem